Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2: Quick Start Guide

This article describes the minimum requirements to launch a Wowza Streaming Engine™ for Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) instance, and stream your first video. To learn more about how to enable additional streaming formats and for more advanced deployment scenarios, see the Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2 User's Guide.

Contents

Video tutorial

Introduction

This document describes how to install and configure Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2, an Amazon web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. Amazon EC2 is a cloud-computing platform that virtualizes computing resources as virtual machines. A single virtual machine configuration is registered as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Wowza Media Systems provides Amazon Linux AMIs with preconfigured and tuned versions of Wowza Streaming Engine that are ready to start using the Amazon EC2 Management Console and the Wowza Streaming Engine Manager.

This document assumes that you're already familiar with Wowza Streaming Engine. If you aren't familiar with Wowza Streaming Engine, you can get a free 180-day trial license for Wowza Streaming Engine by completing a request form on the Wowza Streaming Engine Trial webpage. The Wowza Streaming Engine Trial Edition download includes the Wowza Streaming Engine software, documentation, and examples. The Wowza Streaming Engine User's Guide contains comprehensive documentation about how to install and use the server.

After you have your client-side and server-side applications up-and-running on your computer, use this article to learn how to quickly deploy a Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2 instance. For more extensive deployment documentation, see the Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2 User's Guide.

Option 1: Bring Your Own (LicKey)

The LicKey License option enables you to use your regular subscription or perpetual license key with your Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2 instance. When using this option, billing for your running instance time and bandwidth consumption is managed by Amazon. Wowza Streaming Engine subscription users will continue to receive a separate monthly invoice from Wowza® for usage of the Wowza Streaming Engine software. This option provides access to all Wowza Streaming Engine functionality, including Wowza Transcoder (for 64-bit instances only), Wowza nDVR, and Wowza DRM.

Option 2: DevPay

The DevPay License option enables you to use a Wowza Streaming Engine software license that's embedded in a pre-built Amazon DevPay AMI (a separate license isn't needed). This option provides the convenience of a combined monthly invoice from Amazon for running instance time, bandwidth consumption, and Wowza Streaming Engine usage; however, it doesn't provide allow usage of the Wowza Transcoder, Wowza nDVR, and Wowza DRM features.

Start EC2 Management Console

Amazon EC2 Management Console is a web interface that enables you to manage Amazon EC2 and Wowza Streaming Engine AMIs from a web browser. Many users find that it's easier to use the Management Console instead of the EC2 command line tools.

To start the EC2 Management Console, go to https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2 and sign in using the email address and password that you specified when you signed up for AWS.

The EC2 Dashboard will load in the Management Console. If a different dashboard is displayed, click the Services tab in the navigation bar at the top of the webpage, click All AWS Services, and then click EC2.

When you sign-in to the EC2 Management Console for the first time, the upper-right side of the navigation bar displays a drop-down list of available regions. Wowza provides public Amazon Linux AMIs that are preconfigured to launch in specific regions. For more information about how to select a region for your Wowza Streaming Engine for EC2 instance, see Choose a Wowza Streaming Engine AMI.

Choose a Wowza Streaming Engine AMI

Wowza provides public Amazon Linux AMIs with preconfigured versions of Wowza Streaming Engine that are ready to launch through the EC2 Management Console. You must get a current Wowza Streaming Engine AMI ID for each Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2 instance that you plan to use.

Two collections of pre-built AMIs are listed on the Wowza Pre-Built AMIs webpage, organized by licensing option. Before you choose an AMI from one of these collections for your instance, be sure to consider the following factors:

The licensing model option that you want to use (either LicKey or DevPay). For more information about the licensing options, see the Wowza on Amazon AWS webpage.

Launch the instance

To launch a Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2 instance, do the following:

In the Wowza Pre-Built AMIs webpage, click the link for the Wowza Streaming Engine AMI that you want to use.

If you're signed-in to the EC2 Management Console, it will start and the Choose Instance Type page will be displayed. If you're not signed-in, provide the email address and password that you specified when you signed up for AWS, and then sign in.

In the EC2 Management Console, do the following (we recommend that you leave all optional settings at their default values unless specified otherwise below):

On the Choose Instance Type page, select the instance type that you want to use. The instance type specifies the hardware configuration for your EC2 instance. All Wowza Streaming Engine AMIs are set to use the m1.small instance type by default. To select a different instance type, click All instance types in the navigation pane, and then click the instance type that you want to use in the list. If you're not sure which instance type to select, see Amazon EC2 Instance Types. Because pricing per instance-hour can vary based on the selected instance type, see Amazon EC2 Pricing.

On the Configure Instance Details page, if you have chosen a LicKey AMI ID and you have a Wowza Streaming Engine license that you wish to use, click on the Advanced Details link and enter the following text into the User data text field (replace [license-key] with the Wowza Streaming Engine license key you wish to use):

Code:

WZA_wowzaServerLicenseKey=[license-key]

On the Configure Security Group page, select the option to create a new security group, and then fill out the form. A security group defines firewall rules for your instance in the selected region. For the purposes of this article, open port 1935 in the firewall to enable RTMP streaming and port 8088 for Wowza Streaming Engine Manager. To do this, in the lower pane, select Custom TCP rule in the Protocol list, enter 1935 in the Port Range (Code) box, and then click the Add Rule button. Repeat steps for port 8088.

On the Review page, click Launch. A dialog box will be displayed asking that you either select an existing key pair or a create a new key pair. A key pair enables you to use management tools such as Telnet to connect to your Amazon EC2 instance after you launch it. For the purposes of this article, we'll not use a key pair. In the dropdown list, select the option Proceed without a key pair, select the Acknowledgement checkbox, and then click the Launch Instances button.

Note: If you want to connect to and manage this instance later, see "Creating a key pair" in the Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2 User's Guide. Select the option Choose an existing key pair in the dropdown list, select the key pair name in the Select a key pair list, select the Acknowledgement checkbox, and then click the Launch Instances button.

In the Launch Status page, click the View Instances button to see the status of your EC2 instance. It may take several minutes for your instance to launch. After the Instance State changes from pending to running, the instance is started. It might take an additional minute or two after that before Wowza Streaming Engine is available for streaming.

Important: You'll start incurring charges for your running instance from when it boots until you stop (terminate) it. When you no longer need the instance, follow the instructions in Terminate the instance in order to stop incurring charges.

Getting public domain name and instance ID of instance

You must use the public domain name (or hostname) and instance ID of your running instance to access the instance remotely for configuration using the Wowza Streaming Engine Manager, to connect to the instance using Secure Shell (SSH) and for streaming. To get the public domain name and instance ID of your instance, do the following:

In the Navigation pane in EC2 Management Console, under Instances, click Instances.

Select the running instance.

In the lower pane, click the Description tab. The Public DNS value is the public domain name of your running instance and the Instance ID is the instances instance ID.

Test the instance

You can quickly verify that your running Wowza Streaming Engine for Amazon EC2 instance is working correctly by using the test players that are include with the Wowza Streaming Engine Manager. To test streaming do the following:

Open a web browser and enter the following URL to connect to the Wowza Streaming Engine Manager:

Code:

http://[public-domain-name]:8088

You should now see the Streaming Engine Manager welcome page. Click the Skip Intro button to go directly to the login page.

Enter the User Name wowza and the password is the instance ID you made note of above and click the Sign In button.

Click Applications link in the top navigation bar and click on the vod application.

Click the Test Players… button and the Start button on the right above the video player control.

The Big Buck Bunny video should start to play. You are now ready to configure and use your Wowza Streaming Engine instance on Amazon EC2.

Terminate the instance

When you terminate an instance, you'll lose all changes or files that you have on the server. If you have anything that you don't want to lose, be sure to save it to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) before terminating the instance or you'll lose data. After you've saved your data, do the following to terminate the instance:

In the Navigation pane in EC2 Managment Console, under Instances, click Instances.

Select the running instance.

Click the Actions button, and then click Terminate. The Instance State column for the selected instance will show shutting-down and then terminated.

Important: Amazon recommends that you confirm that the machine reaches the terminated state before you sign out. You'll continue to be charged for instances that fail to shut down correctly.

Originally Published: 03-30-2011.Updated: For Wowza Streaming Engine 4.0 on 02-18-2014.